Max Weber and Gershom Scholem on Jewish Eschatology and Academic Labor

Modern Intellectual History (2021), 1–18 doi:10.1017/S1479244321000329 FORUM: HISTORY’S RELIGION A University in Zion: Max Weber and Gershom Scholem on Jewish Eschatology and Academic Labor Yael Almog* The School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University *Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected] (Received 10 April 2020; revised 25 February 2021; accepted 2 March 2021) In his “Science as Vocation,” Weber equates rational academic conduct with Jewish ethics. For Weber, the Jewish tradition, which separates moral conduct from messianism, is emblematic of scientists’ strenuous distinction of empiricism from metaphysics. The emergence of a Zionist university in Jerusalem, an institute that was positioned as a part of a Jewish nation-building project, complicated this parallel. This article examines Gershom Scholem’s activist approach to Jewish studies as a fundamental revision of the Weberian model of scholarship with the significant role that this model destines to the Jewish tradition. Scholem’s vision of scholarship at the Zionist university constitutes Jewish eschatology as a pillar of a scholastic national tradition. Scholem’s portrayal of Jewish messianism as an insular tradition overturns Weber’s portrayal of Jewish ethics as a lesson for Western academia. Reading Scholem with Weber shows that the enterprise of founding a university in Jerusalem ran counter to European liberal conceptions of Judaism. Moreover, reading them together shows Scholem’s notion of academic labor to reinstitute a separatist theological ethos as a formative model for scholarship. It remains fairly unknown that Max Weber, an eminent commentator on the echoes of religious traditions in modern politics, reflected on the Zionist appropriation of biblical narratives. A letter to E. J. Lesser from 1913 presents these delib- erations.1 Although Weber thought that Zionist colonization of Palestine was feasible, he doubted that Zionism could ever stand up to the theological vision fuel- ing its nation-building project. Weber was skeptical that the mundane functions of state institutions could meet the ambitions at the core of the Zionist project. In his mind, the plan to establish a university in Jerusalem encapsulated this problem: Judaism and especially Zionism rests on the presupposition of a highly con- crete “promise.” Will a prosperous colony, an autonomous petty state with hospitals and good schools ever appear as the “fulfillment” rather than as a 1Max Weber, letter to Ernst J. Lesser, 18 Aug. 1913, in Max Weber: Gesamtausgabe 8, Briefe 1913–1914, ed. Rainer M. Lepsius and Wolfgang J. Mommsen (Tübingen, 2019), 312–15. The letter and its translation are in Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, trans. and ed. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale (New York, 1952), xv. © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 26 Sep 2021 at 20:23:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244321000329 2 Yael Almog critique of this grandiose promise? And even a university? For the meaning of the promise lies on a plane altogether different from the economic goal of coloniali- zation. It would seem to lie in the following: Jewry’ssenseofdignitycouldfeedon the existence and the spiritual possession of this ancient and holy place—just as the Jewish diaspora could build its dignity on the existence of the kingdom of the Maccabees after their war of independence against the empire of the Seleucids; as Germandom all over the world could build its dignity on the existence of the Deutsche Reich, and Islamism on the existence of the caliphate. Germany, however, is, or at least appears to be, a powerful Reich, the empire of the caliphs still covers a large territory—but what at best is the Jewish state nowadays? And what is a university which offers the same as others do? To be sure, it would not be irrelevant but it could hardly compare to the ancient Temple.2 Weber’s account of the Zionist nation-building project unpacks his understanding of national myths. On this point, Weber distinguishes between two forms of national identification for Jews: Jewish diaspora and Zionism. Jewish diaspora builds on the ethos of Jews’ perseverance as an independent religious tradition. The Zionist nation-building project, on the other hand, strives for national sover- eignty that emulates the ancient vision of a centralized nation in which God resides. In Weber’s mind, the future university in the Jewish state was the emblem of this latter promise of fulfillment that the Zionists were propagating. The petty achieve- ments of such a university would show the extent to which the Jewish state falls behind the theological vision at its center. Even if it were to enjoy relative academic success, the Zionist university would fall behind the mythical temple. Whereas other national enterprises parallel in volume the ethos on which they build, Zionism propagates far-reaching enterprises, but it merely displays the discrepancy between the worldly order and eschatology. With a university in the Jewish state, the theological promise of messianic fulfillment that is at the core of Zionism would be ridiculed rather than fulfilled. While Weber formulated his critique of the Jewish university, an aspiring sixteen-year-old intellectual decided to dedicate his life to scholarship upon studying a single page of the Talmud. That young man would become a defining figure for Jewish studies in general and at the Hebrew University in particular. Gershom Scholem, an eminently influential professor, public intellectual, and university admin- istrator, pursued an unusual specialization in Jewish mysticism—a field that had hardly been taken seriously as an object of academic research. Unlike Weber, Scholem worked on Jewish history from the inside. He took an active role in shaping this history via recounting it while accentuating his own Jewish identity. Scholem reinterpreted the prophetic promise extrapolated from Jewish sources. His work centered on a new prism to those sources: the nation-building project of which he was a part. Scholem’s strict separation of Jewish and Christian approaches to prophecy set in motion his conceptualization of academic labor through the historically specific case of Jewish scholars’ study of the Jewish sources. Those scholars take part, he argued, in an insular tradition that correlates the study of the Jewish sources to a dynamic perception of messianism. In building on this argument, Scholem 2Weber, Ancient Judaism, xv. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 26 Sep 2021 at 20:23:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244321000329 Modern Intellectual History 3 presented the scholar as an able and active party in determining the historical valence of theology. This view is embedded in Scholem’s integration of the study of Jewish esotericism in the secular realm of academia. Scholem’s enterprise shows that the establishment of a university in Jerusalem prompted a main Weberian idea: the view that academic institutions do not merely operate under the cultural influence of theological narratives but also intervene in the sociopolitical conditions for the reception of theology. Scholem has put into practice the notion that teaching and research shape theological visions. Accordingly, academics’ attempts to base their scholarly ambitions on an eschato- logical image coexisted with attempts to revise that image. As I wish to show, for Scholem, constituting a scholarly agenda built on reflective rewriting of theological myth. The aspect of this reciprocity that went well beyond the Weberian paradigm was the appropriation of the rewriting of theology for a project that aligned scholarly methodology with separatist nationalism. Weber on ancient Judaism Weber’s investigation of Judaism was part of an overarching project: the compara- tive examination of divergent religions in order to discern their influence on modern social norms, particularly on economic behavior. Through his inquiries into the history of theology in such regions as China and India, Weber opted to trace the roads not taken by Western theology that would have led, in his view, to inherently different systems of values. Judaism is a unique historical case within Weber’s account of world religions. In Weber’s mind, since antiquity, Judaism has had a distinct set of values that dictated its unique ethics. Weber’s Ancient Judaism (Das alte Judentum, 1917) illustrates this view in attempting to scrutinize the historical circumstances that gave rise to Judaism’s notion of morality. Significantly, ancient Judaism rejected magic as a practice of dealing with evil forces. Judaism thus brought about a revolution by leading its believers to a pol- itical and social system governed by God—a system that guided believers’ everyday moral choices. Because of this, Judaism plays an especially important role in world history. In Weber’s mind, ancient Judaism subtracted the irrational means of seeking salvation from religious experience. According to the Jewish worldview, God would punish His people (and the individual believer) for immoral behavior; each believer is responsible for his or her conduct. At the same time, however, there is no guarantee that moral behavior will lead to future salvation. The realization of prophecy—or of messianic claims—remains entirely in divine hands.3 Weber believed that the ten- sion embodied in the distinction of moral imperatives from messianic hope impreg- nated Judaism’s social ethics. To understand the liberal tendencies embedded in this approach to Judaism, one needs to consider the intellectual background with which Weber corresponded.

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